F for Fake

Directed, written, and narrated by Orson Welles, this 1974 pseudo-documentary studies the nature of authenticity by looking at people known for deception. Subjects include renowned art forger Elmyer de Hory, his biographer (and the author of a fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes) Clifford Irving, Welles’ companion Oja Kodar, and, ultimately, Welles himself.

The last completed Welles film, F for Fake is less a documentary than it is a visual essay on authenticity, credibility, authorship, and artistic values. At its best, it is clever, amusing, and incisive. At its worst, it is self-indulgent, pretentious, and incoherent. And if it seems like it should be two films, that’s because it really is. The project began with a straightforward documentary of de Hory by Francois Reichenbach, which Welles then expanded and put his creative stamp on. Whether this would have fared better in its original format depends on your preferences, but it certainly would have been less interesting.

What stands out most here is the film’s style. Welles and collaborator Gary Graver did a masterful job of editing, weaving the interview segments, historical images, and a jazzy Michel Legrand score into a kinetic, fluid whirr. Though the film preceded the MTV generation, it seems right at home with more contemporary efforts.

In terms of content, the film boasts a quirky cast of characters. De Hory comes across as sagacious and likeable as he and Welles exchange some well-deserved shots at the art establishment (The former at one point boasts that he never offered a forged painting to a museum that didn’t buy it). Irving, who writes off de Hory as delusional, seems as smarmy as he does skeptical. Interestingly, Welles constantly reminds us of his own inauthenticity: he opens the film by performing magic tricks, and he harkens back to his War of the Worlds days by recreating his faux news broadcast of an alien invasion.

The film decisively jumps off the rails at the one hour mark, after which Welles relinquishes any claim to the events being true. Kodar features heavily in these final segments, and she’s often shown in a needlessly voyeuristic light (one piece has Pablo Picasso lusting after her from afar). This last third begins amusingly, but it eventually becomes overwhelmingly bizarre and indifferent to the concerns of the audience. It was as if Welles grew bored with the film he was making and decided to shoot some esoteric exchanges with his girlfriend instead.

Thankfully, for as jarring as these end parts are, they do not sink the film as a whole. If you are willing to forgo a traditional narrative, F for Fake will reward you with its quirks, perceptiveness, and technical prowess, and that is the truth.

8/10

I Love PHO Asian Cuisine

Located at 4175 High Point Road just beyond the Greensboro city limits, I Love PHO offers authentic-style Vietnamese cuisine, including the eponymous noodle soup. It is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Sunday.

This strip mall location had been home to two Thai restaurants prior to I Love PHO moving in. If that’s an omen for things to come, get it while the getting’s good. I Love PHO (the establishment spells its name with a heart symbol) dishes out the signature soup with gusto. The broth is flavorful (and, like any legitimate pho, customizable: you can pick the meats and tinker with the seasoning to your heart’s content) and it comes in three sizes. Considering that the $6.45 “small” will still fill you up, that’s a steal.

The rest of the menu appears to be equally reasonable. Almost all entrees are $9.95 or less, and you’ll find many familiar offerings. Beef basil, pad thai, fried rice, and mixed bowls are all up for the taking as is a variety of exotic beverages (milk and egg yoke, anyone?).

I Love PHO is not large, but the proprietors make good use of the space. Seating appears adequate and the red and black décor is inoffensive if a bit spartan. My server was soft-spoken yet polite, and wait time was minimal. A testament to the restaurant’s credibility can be found in the fact that mine was the only Caucasian face in the restaurant at the time of my visit.

For those who don’t travel High Point Road regularly, I Love PHO is a bit out of the way, and the overall dining experience doesn’t quite measure up to Pho Hien Vuong. But if you are in the vicinity of Jamestown or outer Greensboro and want a cheap, filling meal with flavor, phoget about going anywhere else.

8/10

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Holocaust survivors, Israeli settlers, affluent Americanized Jews, and bullied children grapple with faith, guilt, morality, history, cultural identity, and more in Nathan Englander’s 2012 short story collection.

Much like Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander can both be called a “Jewish writer” and so much more than that. But while Chabon uses ingenious settings (the Khazar Empire, an alt-history Alaska, etc.) to explore Jewish themes, the Long Island-born, Orthodox-raised Englander takes a more straightforward approach. The results aren’t always as entertaining, but they at least try to be enlightening.

In Englander’s latest collection, there are successes and failures both. The strongest offering here is the title story. Named in homage to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (in which two middle-aged couples exchange uninhibited banter while drunk on cheap gin), “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” features an awkward rendezvous between secular Jews and Hassidim that takes on new dimensions when an intoxicant is brought into play. The piece is as quirky and slyly humorous as it is weighty and tense, and if the whole collection was as well put-together, the copious amount of blurbs on the book’s outer jacket would be considerably more understandable.

Strangely enough for the U.S.-born Englander, the two other stories that stand out here are set in Israel. “Sister Hills” features a resolute settler woman who has lost both husband and sons and clings fiercely to what she has left. The juxtaposition of her attitude with the views of those around her offers some insight into the fragmented nature of Israeli society. The final story in the collection, “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” leaves a war veteran to explain to his son his deference to a seemingly callous colleague who survived the Holocaust. Here, Englander gives us a stark accounting of just how much the Holocaust sucked the humanity from all that it affected.

The remainder of the collection falters for a variety of reasons. “How We Avenged the Blums” is a humorous take on underdogs fighting back, but it feels slight. “Peep Show” goes for shock value: a gentrified Jew confronts the ghosts of his past (in the form of rabbis) in a nudie booth. It’s original, but not particularly coherent. “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side" tries to tell a family’s history in list form, a gimmick that never seems justified here. “Camp Sundown” has probably the best premise of the lot – a group of elderly Jews at a summer camp suspect one of their own of being a concentration camp guard – but squanders it by hitching the narrative to a weak protagonist and vacillating between humor and horror with little finesse.  

Though there is thematic overlap between all of the stories here, it would not be fair to dismiss Englander as a one-note writer. However, there is something to be said for broadening one’s focus instead of trying different, only partly successful permutations of the same ideas.

7.25/10

Storm Front

Storm Front

Chicago-based wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden is called upon to help a woman locate her magic-using husband. Not long thereafter, a mob enforcer and his consort end up dead, and the police are looking to Harry for answers. As if that isn’t enough, the magic world’s rule-keepers are convinced that he is up to no good and are determined to bring him to justice.

The first book in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series, Storm Front lets us into Dresden’s world and gives us shades of his backstory while still maintaining an aura of mystery about him. That may be a reason to read the follow-ups because the writing here certainly is not.

Though intended, undoubtedly, as an homage to classic noir, Storm Front parrots the worst of the genres clichés. Dresden himself is the archetypical brooding, sarcastic, down-on-his luck antihero. The magical elements do add a sense of novelty to his character, but he comes across far too often as a third-rate Philip Marlowe ripoff with a pentagram and a staff. Unfortunately, his supporting cast is no better. His tough-but-fair-minded police contact, Karrin Murphy, is basically Marlowe’s Bernie Ohls in a skirt, and the sympathetic bartender, the smooth Mafioso, the skeptical cop, the client withholding information, and the (in this case, literal) hard-bitten vamp are all stock characters we’ve seen before.

Alas, the familiarity extends to the plotting as well. As per genre conventions, the people Dresden talks to for information have a way of ending up dead shortly thereafter, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Also, one would have to be an idiot (or Dresden himself for half of the book) to not wonder if the wizard’s two cases are in some way related. To top it all off, there’s even an “all’s well that ends well” wrap-up at the end.

Two things save this book from being a total bust. One, the oddity of the magic/mystery mashup lends itself to some amusement. There’s Bob, the horny ghost that Dresden keeps in a skull, and there’s a fairy that randomly craves pizza. Secondly, Butcher has a decent eye for detail and renders Chicago’s cityscape in appropriately dreary hues.

Given that Butcher wrote Storm Front at age 25, there is reason to believe that his work has gained polish and complexity in the years since (he’s now 40). But if Storm Front is indeed a harbinger of things to come, then the much-ballyhooed series seems like less than a magical reading experience.

6.75/10